


REM

by powerandpathos



Series: 19 Days After-Shots [9]
Category: 19天 - Old先 | 19 Days - Old Xian
Genre: Angst, M/M, after-shot, the usual, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 13:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15886662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powerandpathos/pseuds/powerandpathos
Summary: Guan Shan chews it all down. ‘Why’re you here?’ he asks. ‘Why are you back?’‘Didn’t you miss me?’‘You should’ve stayed there and done us all a favour.’—19 Days after-shot of ch. 254: He Tian's return





	REM

**Author's Note:**

> Want to support me? [Find out on Tumblr!](http://agapaic.tumblr.com)
> 
> With thanks to [Damien](http://goupthemountaintian.tumblr.com) for proofreading.

He sleeps fitfully. 

There’s sweat layered on his brow and his fingernails look like he’s been digging his way out of a grave, and Guan Shan wonders if there’s much of a difference between the metaphor and reality of wherever the fuck He Tian’s been the past few days. Images of live burial and mounding earth and desperate, filthy struggle flash through Guan Shan’s mind, and he mulls it over, thoughts dark and sticky as molasses.  

Guan Shan tries to use the lines at the corners of He Tian’s mouth to decipher where he’s been, tries to use the collection of bodily twitches under his sheets to make sense of what he’s been doing. His REM disturbances don’t give much away; his dreaming allows only a garbled mess of sounds to slip from his mouth like a patchy radio frequency. Guan Shan doesn’t know the guy well enough to make sense of any of this.

He knows what to expect—he knows when the hits are going to come and how hard to throw them back. He knows He Tian’s serious less than he is darkly comic and that he works through three cigarettes at lunch and tries to delay going home to an empty apartment after school. He doesn’t know the bowed weight of He Tian’s head on his shoulder, like a thwarted king relinquishing his crown, and he’s new to He Tian’s exhaustion let out in a breathy confession in the crook of his neck.

_ You came back _ , Guan Shan had said, stilted, stunned.

And He Tian had said, ‘Where else was I supposed to go?’

He’d smuggled He Tian into his bedroom— _ I just need sleep. Please, Guan Shan, just let me crash for a night _ —and kicked the other two out while Jian Yi slurped down tapioca balls from his bubble tea and Zhengxi struggled into his too-ripped jeans. The bag of cash was left obtrusively on the table, and Guan Shan felt sweat soaking his underarms with every stray glance. 

He thinks about it now in the same way he remembers that He Tian had paid for his hospital bills—thought about it as He Tian stripped off his clothes and made a nest of Guan Shan’s mattress and bed sheets. As Guan Shan pushed down the anger like bile and lava and told himself that he  _ owed  _ him, and his entitled disgruntlement had no place here.

Mostly, he thinks two things now. The first is that He Tian makes his bed look small. 

The second is that He Tian is  _ here _ and, synonymously, not in his own home.

Impulse and a childhood of habit, cultivated like stinging nettles, makes him want to kick He Tian from the bed until his kneecaps bruise against the floor. The rest of him, fragmented shrapnel from a war he doesn’t remember fighting, lets He Tian be. 

His own tiredness is dragging sorely at him when 2am strikes itself onto his digital clock face. 

He can’t say what it is that makes He Tian stir, that pries his dark lashes apart and makes him gaze out blearily into the darkness of Guan Shan’s bedroom. He only knows that the room turns electric when He Tian twists from a vacant mummy of a thing to something that’s awake and liable to swipe, newly animated. The hairs on Guan Shan’s arm rise.

‘Wh’time is it?’ He Tian mumbles, fumbling around for his phone.

Guan Shan sits up in his desk chair. The base of his spine twinges. He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there. 

_ Fucking creep,  _ he throws at himself. 

‘Just gone two,’ he tells He Tian. ‘You’ve been dead to the world.’

‘Feels like I’m still there,’ He Tian says through a yawn, not bothering to cover his mouth. Guan Shan eyes the string of spit between his molars and the dark cavern of his throat, snapped shut. He Tian rolls over onto his side, shoulder blades bare and gleaming in the dark. ‘Wake me up when summer’s over.’

Guan Shan gets to his feet. ‘I don’t fuckin’ think so. You owe me an explanation.’

He Tian’s voice is muffled into the bedsheets. ‘I don’t owe you a thing. My debt’s paid for.’

‘What debt?’

He Tian doesn’t reply. Guan Shan stares at his back and wills a response from him, because he doesn’t want to resort to fists. He could feel He Tian’s tiredness like an ache in his marrow in the stairwell, and it shreds at the inside of him now like he’s being julienned. 

Guan Shan’s fists curl at his sides. ‘I’m tired, and you’re in  _ my _ bed, fuckass.’ 

‘Easy solution to that.’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ Guan Shan growls, lip curled.

‘Wouldn’t have said it if I wouldn’t.’

_ ‘Fucker,’ _ Guan Shan spits, lurching forward and taking a fistful of skin, He Tian’s shoulder warm under his hand, and he only gets He Tian on his back, hair sleep-mussed and skin sheet-lined, before he just… let’s go. 

He’s fifteen, and he doesn’t know what he’s feeling. The fury of it blinds him. He’s incapable of doing most things, and the limitations of that don’t even include himself. He thinks about peeling his skin back until he’s red and white, organs pumping frantically like a fish out of water, flesh revealed like a strip of pulverised meat. Would his pulse beat out an answer? Would it lie there like a crystal ready for harvesting? 

‘What?’ says He Tian, looking at him, waiting.

Guan Shan chews it all down. ‘Why’re you here?’ he asks. ‘Why are you back?’

‘Didn’t you miss me?’

‘You should’ve stayed there and done us all a favour.’

He Tian smirks. ‘You don’t mean that.’

Guan Shan steps back until the chair hits his thighs. He sinks down into it. His stomach is churning. He Tian’s eyes are heavy-lidded with needed sleep, but they track him across the room. Light leaks beneath the door from the hallway and settles in the dips of He Tian’s collarbones; the rest of him is a swathe of shadows.

‘You left,’ Guan Shan says. ‘You put your middle finger up at me in the hospital room and you fuckin’  _ left _ .’

‘I had places to be,’ He Tian says, plucking feathers from the casing of Guan Shan’s pillow. ‘Family shit.’

Guan Shan flinches at what he  _ knows  _ is a lie; he’d thought that shit didn’t have a place between them. They might not talk about much but at least they don’t coat their words in bullshit Guan Shan can smell from a mile off. 

‘You don’t talk to your family,’ he says.  _ You, you, you. _ ‘You don’t give a chicken  _ shit _ about them.’

‘You know that, do you?’ He Tian murmurs. He chuckles, smothers his face in a hand, knuckles bared to the ceiling. They’re scabbing over. ‘’Course you fucking do. Who else would?’

Guan Shan runs his palms over his thighs. He simmers in his anger like an overspilling pan, water spitting and hissing against an open flame. It’s unfounded; it’s undeserved. What does he have to be angry about? His father would be right to strike him across the head for it, if he’d been here. For the ingratitude. For the chip on his shoulder that’s blurring pride with boorish callousness.  

He Tian saved his life. Saved more than that for him. He Tian saved his future. 

So why didn’t Guan Shan deserve a proper goodbye? An explanation?

The flame burns like a bonfire, pan overturned. His skin burns and blisters with the scalding of boiling water. Self-made violence bubbles, explodes—scars him. He wishes his insignificance wasn’t so fucking loud. 

‘Places to be,’ he murmurs to himself. He glances up. ‘If you’re so fuckin’ busy, why the hell are you here? Fuck off. Go home.’

Silence fills the room like a vacuum, and Guan Shan’s deaf to the pounding shoes upstairs, the siren whirs and blaring car horns on the streets below. He watches He Tian’s eyes wander the ceiling like there are stars peeking through the plaster, dots of white flame trying to make themselves known. He closes his eyes, and Guan Shan doesn’t pretend he isn’t watching him. 

_ Where’s He Tian? Have you seen him? Aren’t you  _ always together?

Guan Shan pulls at a hangnail on his thumb, digs his nails into his palms until he recognises the sting. What had changed when he hadn’t noticed? When had the permanence settled, which Guan Shan hadn’t realised until it was ripped away, sunlight blocked out by the slow roll of purpling storm clouds.

‘You left me,’ he says, fast and quiet enough he can’t be sure he even said it. ‘You fuckin’ left and now you show back up and leave me in the dark. You can’t pretend you give a shit about me and then just— _ leave.  _ I’m too fuckin’ used to that.’

‘What are you gonna do about it?’

He Tian’s propped himself up on one arm, cheek pressed into a curled fist. There’s no smirk, just hooded eyes and a thin press of his mouth tilted to the side. He seems contained—and placid. Exhaustion seeps from him like fog, and Guan Shan thinks the weakness makes him more dangerous.   

‘What?’ Guan Shan asks. 

He Tian’s shoulder lifts, and drops. ‘If you’re so pissed off with something, shouldn’t you fix it?’

Guan Shan snaps. ‘I told you to fuck off.’

‘I’m supposed to listen to that? That’s interesting.’

Guan Shan gets to his feet again. ‘This is bullshit. You’re bullshit.’   

Momentum and tunnel vision crafted from anger take him to the door, get his fingers around the handle, and his forehead on the panelling. Out. He wants to get out, and away from the person lying in his bed who saved his life and owes him nothing. His breath is ragged and feels like it’s scraping its way out of his throat.

‘You’re just gonna leave?’ He Tian asks from behind him. ‘Just like that?’

Exhaling feels like breathing out glass shards. ‘Now you know how it fuckin’ feels.’

‘Wait.’ There’s a rustle of sheets behind Guan Shan. The soft thud of feet landing in carpet. Warmth of bare skin at his back. ‘Listen. You didn’t deserve the radio silence. But I didn’t want you to get involved in the shit that my family’s involved in. You don’t deserve that.’

‘We’re not friends,’ Guan Shan mutters, drawing his arms around himself, thinking about the nights he’d spent glancing at the black screen of his phone, staring at old messages under the table during class, hanging with Jian Yi and Zhengxi and waiting to talk to someone else, thoughts pulled away into a new orbit. ‘You can do whatever the fuck you want.’

‘Right,’ He Tian drawls. Tiredness leaks into the sarcasm. ‘But  _ doing _ whatever the fuck I want makes you whine like a little bitch—so no. I  _ can’t _ . And maybe I shouldn’t.’ 

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means…’ He Tian huffs. His breath washes warmly over the back of Guan Shan’s neck. There’s a whole  _ constellation _ of thoughts blossoming in his head right now, webbing out like comet trails and trying to find a landing spot without the destruction of gravity and sheer fucking  _ mass.  _ ‘It means I came here ‘cause I didn’t know where else to go. Because home isn’t home to me and—you feel like the closest damn thing to it.’ Stilted, and alien, laughter trickles from his throat. ‘I feel like I know who I am with you.’

‘I fucking don’t,’ Guan Shan says. He turns, feels the handle jam itself into the base of his spine. Like Guan Shan’s bed, He Tian takes up more space than should be possible, too much skin on show and shoulders taking up the width of the door. Guan Shan hates that he has to look up to reach He Tian’s eyes; he hates that they’re a closed-off wall of blackness. He hates that he wants He Tian’s mouth murmuring into his neck again. ‘I don’t know a single fuckin’ thing about you. We all spend so much fuckin’ time with each other, but what do we actually  _ know?  _ Not a goddamn—not a damn fuckin’ thing. We’re beatin’ the shit out of each other too often to know.’

‘D’you even want to?’ He Tian asks, dampened with exhaustion.

Guan Shan blinks. ‘What?’’ 

‘Do you  _ want  _ to,’ He Tian repeats. ‘Know about me. Do you want to know all the fucking details from the shitshow of my life?’

‘Yeah.’

He blurts it out before he processes He Tian’s question. Blurts it before he knows what he’s saying—what he’s promising—what He Tian’s really  _ asking _ , wrapped up in grime and blood and something that tastes like metal. He Tian asks it with the kind of tiredness Guan Shan knows well, a blurry exhaustion that comes from throwing himself against an immovable wall studded with knives.

And then it only takes a second. Two seconds, at most. 

It couldn’t have been more, because Guan Shan knows he’s impulsive when he means it. He knows the anger only ever comes quick when it’s real, hot as a forest fire in a drought. So when the question slips through his head again without a net, when he doesn’t feel the burn to ask what the  _ fuck  _ He Tian has to complain about, Guan Shan says it again. 

‘Yeah. I do.’

He Tian deflates like Guan Shan’s words are a needle, collapses around the edges, lifts up at the corners of his mouth. 

‘Good,’ he says, layers of tension rolling off him like early morning mist. They look at each other. ‘Now are you gonna let me fucking sleep?’

Guan Shan shrugs. ‘Take the sofa, and I’ll think about it.’

He Tian chuckles. ‘You’re a hard son of a bitch, Mo Guan Shan.’

‘I don’t think you’d want me to be anythin’ else.’

‘You’re right,’ says He Tian. ‘I really wouldn’t.’ 

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving kudos, commenting, and/or see ways of supporting me as a writer [via my Tumblr](agapaic.tumblr.com)!


End file.
